If you draw a 50x50km square on a map of France, you'll quickly realize that's an area the size of Luxembourg - not exactly negligible.

Pretty much. How much is used by vinyards? Or farms?

It's the yellow dots here

https://imgur.com/418BI6Q

France has about 1 million km of roads [1], lets assume at least 2m wide. That's 2,000 sq km.

How many of these roads can you see on this picture

https://imgur.com/FCyt4O6

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

A 50×50 km square would be 2500 km². We're talking about 52 km², which is a 7.2 km × 7.2 km square. Shitty dimensional analysis strikes again!

> A 50×50 km square would be 2500 km². We're talking about 52 km², which is a 7.2 km × 7.2 km square. Shitty dimensional analysis strikes again!

According to the parent poster, those 52 km² are needed for 1GW. France needs around 50GW, 50 times more power and area, ergo 2500 km².

Oh, I see. Thank you for clarifying.

The US would need about 50x500km !

It is becoming very hard to install news wind onshore in France, people are revolting against wind turbine because it decrease real estate price and are found ugly and noisy, and it is happening at a way lower penetration rate than Germany.